Showing results by author "Nelson Algren" in All Categories

Nelson Algren was a renowned writer, known for his penetrating and influential social novels such as The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Originally published in 1935, Somebody in Boots was Algren’s first novel, based on his experiences living in Texas during the Great Depression. A wonderful companion to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, this new edition of Somebody in Boots features an introduction by Colin Asher, the author of a biography of Algren. 

The Devil’s Stocking is the story of Ruby Calhoun, a boxer accused of murder in a shadowy world of low-purse fighters, cops, con artists, and bar girls. Chronicling a battle for truth and human dignity which gives way to a larger story of life and death decisions, literary grandmaster Nelson Algren’s last novel is a fitting capstone to a long and brilliant career.

Algren’s classic 1947 short story collection is the pure vein Algren would mine for all his subsequent novels and stories. The stories in this collection are literary triumphs that “don’t fade away.” Among the stories included here are “A Bottle of Milk for Mother”, about a Chicago youth being cornered for a murder, and “The Face on the Barrome Floor”, in which a legless man pummels another man nearly to death - the seeds that would grow into the novel Never Come Morning.

Nelson Algren’s two travel writing books describe his journeys through the seamier sides of great American cities and the international social and political landscapes of the mid-1960s. Algren at Sea brings them together in one volume. Notes from a Sea Diary offers one of the most remarkable appraisals of Ernest Hemingway ever written. Who Lost an American? is a whirlwind spin through Paris and Playboy clubs, New York publishing and Dublin pubs, Crete, and Chicago.

“You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich”, writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: “Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder.” In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer’s relation to society....

Nelson Algren reading from The Man With the Golden Arm, James Jones reading from The Thin Red Line, John Updike reading “Lifeguard” from Pigeon Feathers and Other, Bernard Malamud reading from “The Mourners” from The Magic Barrre.

Nelson Algren brings a deeply personal tone to his reading about Sophie, the doomed wife of card dealer and drug addict Frankie Machine, wanted for murder, as she waits futilely for him to return home.

This thrilling production of one of Algren’s best-known stories traces the gritty lives of Polish youths in the Chicago slums of the 1940s. A full-cast performance featuring Kurt Brocker, Richard Cotovsky, Sharon Gopfert, Andrew Hawkes, Jonathan Lavan, Loren Lazerine, Robert Maffia, Guy Massey, G. Riley Mills, Turk Muller, Lara Phillips, and Andy Roski.

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren’s lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren’s beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren’s intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.

In Entrapment and Other Writings - containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays - Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon, despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure.